Thanks for the memories and storage.

It’s odd what will make you sad.

Between 1998 and 2004 I ran Hotline and KDX servers, dedicated to political material and whatever else I fancied. In a time when online storage was expensive and legally risky, running a small server with files on your home computer felt safe, and if you managed it well you got to know people who would log on to your computer regularly and chat for a bit. I still have chat-logs of conversations ranging from trite bullshit to discussions on abortion and propaganda…

What sets places like a KDX server apart from cloud-hosted communities (Facebook, MySpace, Betapet) is that you actually feel like you’re at someone’s place when you log in. When I was running the Tiny Socialist Server I had a rule that you had to greet everyone who was logged on before downloading anything; It’s common courtesy to at least say “hi” when entering a house, even if all you want to do is to sit on the couch, so I started to kick people out if they logged on and downloaded stuff without greeting the other users. Anarchism requires you to have some fucking manners.

The other day I needed to transfer 7 GB of video so I brought the KDX server back from retirement.

While I was at it, I decided to find an old KDX hangout on which I knew some people, the Documentary Archives. This server was a giant in its time, with scores of users, many of whom I considered some sort of friend. My old bookmarks didn’t work, so I logged into another server — one of the few remaining — to ask if anyone knew where I could find DA or what had happened to it. The response I got was:

[netfreak] I’ve heard of that place but never was on it

I felt both excited and depressed at the same time. Excited because something which I had been a part of now was considered “history” by the newcomers, and depressed because I missed the place; I’ll never find the fragmented, reformatted, erased or mothballed harddrive sectors I remember hanging out at.

Is this how people felt when FidoNet servers started to drop out in favour of WWW, or when their favourite MUD/MUSH shut down? Considering the hundreds, if not thousands, of hours I put in to make my server run smoothly, chatting with people from all over the world, and nesting in general, I feel a personal sense of betrayal that there isn’t even a Wikipedia page dedicated to KDX, to say nothing of the Documentary Archives, only a mention in the Hotline article.

For a time I nourished the idea that I should be logged in somewhere at all times. By running my own server, I could be online and present at a place where others could see me, and often I would log in to servers or join an IRC channel just to be somewhere while I slept. Even though you are not conscious of your surroundings when you sleep, you still exist; And it felt important to think of myself as existing online, not only to me, but as a proof of the possibilities that the net embodied.

This wasn’t about being connected 24/7, but rather an acknowledgement of that you belong at one place at a time — that even if you’re jumping across continents from server to server, your attention is still mediated through a sense of place; Running servers and visiting others’ servers helped me establish who I was — and still am — online.

The feeling of sadness and loss is pure nostalgia though; Today, my presence online isn’t defined by a logged in piece of software, but rather though the ubiquitous connectivity afforded me by my cellphone — alas, the nerd I has merged with the physical me, and we’re once again meat and fat wrapped in a sack of skin, only with a smartphone stuck to the side of the head.

2 thoughts on “Thanks for the memories and storage.”

  1. I can’t say I have any nostalgia or wistful longing for past infotech and accompanying human relations. Maybe I didn’t spend as much time on online in the 300baud days, or thoughts of my
    first webpages leave me wanting. I definitely had far more e-relationships in the early days.

    I’m more interested in the stuff I missed perhaps… never heard of KDX… to the wikipedia!
    Thanks for this…

  2. Part of my nostalgia is kindled by the mess that is Facebook and its ilk; The blunt tools and sheer mass of people. Dedicated KDX servers had an owner and profile, which fostered local cultural ecologies, with in-jokes and taboos, with drama and infighting, and with an emotionally more intense environment; Web 2.0 might have ushered in a new mode of media co-creation, but as far as conversations goes it’s qualitatively different from the closed-off world of yesteryear: Today we’re speaking to an audience, even when we’re speaking with each other.

    What happened on one KDX server usually stayed there, spreading by personal word of type rather than Google searches or a wall page. Board messages and comments didn’t get cross-posted onto multiple servers, so in that sense you create a very private sphere — with everything good and bad which that entails — compared to Usenet (where articles show up in general searches) or, heaven forfend, Facebook, where anything you do in any publicly accesible page gets dumped into a timeline.

    Even places which don’t lend themselves to this visibility, are filtered through lolblogs (Fail-book.tumblr.com, Failbook.com, bash.org) and we’re only one drunk message away from being posted to the Weekend Web over at Something Aweful. The reason I don’t have my Twitter account fed into Facebook is that my misanthropic necrophiliac persona doesn’t go over well there, and it bespeaks the value of secluded online spots, restricted by membership or technical self-selection.

    Not everyone has a sense of humour but most everyone has a Facebook account.

    OTOH, specialised forums (all the PHP/MySql boilerplates) have many of the same features which KDX / Hotline had, with tiered forums (Lockpicking101.com for example) file cataloguing and transfer (hello cinematik.net and The Pirate Bay) and live chat ( Torrentech.org to mention but one). It doesn’t feel the same to do these things in a browser as opposed to firing up a dedicated application, but that’s mostly garnish.

    The last part of my nostalgia can be traced to the dictionary definition of the word, and it only serves to make me feel oldish. […] a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.

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